Of course, you'll get a bunch of warnings from the activation script:
$ nixos-enter --root /tmp/mnt/
setting up /etc...
mount: /dev: permission denied.
mount: /dev/pts: permission denied.
mount: /dev/shm: permission denied.
mount: /sys: permission denied.
/nix/var/nix/profiles/system/activate: line 74: /proc/sys/kernel/modprobe: Permission denied
chown: changing ownership of '/run/wrappers/wrappers.0pKlU8JsvV/dbus-daemon-launch-helper': Invalid argument
NOTE: Under Linux, effective file capabilities must either be empty, or
exactly match the union of selected permitted and inheritable bits.
Failed to set capabilities on file `/run/wrappers/wrappers.0pKlU8JsvV/ping' (Operation not permitted)
chown: changing ownership of '/run/wrappers/wrappers.0pKlU8JsvV/unix_chkpwd': Invalid argument
[root@nixos:/]#
The use of Nix 2.0 significantly simplifies the installer, since we
can just pass a different store URI (--store /mnt) - it's no longer
needed to set up a chroot environment for the build, and to bootstrap
Nix into the chroot.
Also, commands that need to run in the installation (namely boot
loader installation and setting a root password) are now executed
using nixos-enter.
This also removes the need for nixos-prepare-root since any required
initialisation is done by Nix or by the activation script.
In particular, it conflicts with `services.tlp.enable` option.
There exists workaround:
```
powerManagement.cpuFreqGovernor = lib.mkForce null;
services.tlp.enable = true;
```
But should it?
Regression introduced by 801c920e95.
Since then, the btrfsSimple subtest of the installer VM test fails with:
Btrfs did not return a path for the subvolume at /
The reason for this is that the output for "btrfs subvol show" has
changed between version 4.8.2 and 4.13.1.
For example the output of "btrfs subvol show /" in version 4.8.2 was:
/ is toplevel subvolume
In version 4.13.1, the output now is the following and thus the regular
expressions used in nixos-generate-config.pl and install-grub.pl now
match (which results in the error mentioned above):
/
Name: <FS_TREE>
UUID: -
Parent UUID: -
Received UUID: -
Creation time: -
Subvolume ID: 5
Generation: 287270
Gen at creation: 0
Parent ID: 0
Top level ID: 0
Flags: -
Snapshot(s):
In order to fix this I've changed nixos-generate-config.pl and
install-grub.pl, because both use "btrfs subvol show" in a similar vein,
so the regex for parsing the output now doesn't match anymore whenever
the volume path is "/", which should result in the same behaviour as we
had with btrfs-progs version 4.8.2.
Tested against the btrfsSimple, btrfsSubvols and btrfsSubvolDefault
subtests of the installer VM test and they all succeed now.
Signed-off-by: aszlig <aszlig@redmoonstudios.org>
This changes much of the make-disk-image.nix logic (and thus most NixOS
image building) to use LKL to set up the target directory structure rather
than a Linux VM. The only work we still do in a VM is less IO-heavy stuff
that while still time-consuming, is less of the overall load. The goal is
to kill more of that stuff, but that will require deeper changes to NixOS
activation scripts and switch-to-configuration.pl, and I don't want to
bite off too much at once.
The key distinction I'm drawing is that there's a component that deals
with the store of the machine being built, and another component for
the store building it. The inner part of it assumes nothing from the
builder (doesn't need chroot or root powers) so it can run comfortably
inside a Nix build, as well as nixos-rebuild. I have some upcoming work
that will use that to significantly speed up and streamline image builds
for NixOS, especially on virtualized hosts like EC2, but it's also a
reasonable speedup on native hosts.
